John Pletz On Technology

Young Turks come to Chicago for Demo Day

A trio of Booth School of Business alumni exported the startup-accelerator idea to Turkey. Now they're bringing the finished product back to Chicago.

Serhat Cicekoglu, Bob Gillespie and Burak Cendek launched an accelerator in Ankara this summer to help 18 young companies in Teknojumpp, a startup tech park affiliated with Turkey's ODTU Teknokent, or Middle Eastern Technical University. They spent three months helping the companies think about how to scale up their businesses beyond Turkey and raise venture capital, both of which are relatively unusual concepts.

“They don't know what a term sheet is,” says Mr. Gillespie, co-founder and former CEO of Chicago-based startup InContext Solutions Inc., who met Messrs. Cicekoglu and Cendek through Booth. “We've been helping them understand how to think like Western entrepreneurs, how to get access to capital and get big. It's the idea of explosive growth, not incremental growth.”

They've brought eight of the most promising companies to Chicago, where they're hosting a Demo Day for prospective investors from 9 a.m. to noon on Sept. 20 at University of Chicago's Gleacher Center downtown. The group hopes to attract about 50 investors.

What the companies lacked in savvy about how venture-backed startups operate in the U.S., the entrepreneurs made up for in tech skills. Most of the companies are much more mature — between three and eight years old — than what you find at accelerators such as TechStars or ImpactEngine.

InfoDif, a video-surveillance company, has about $1 million in annual revenue and is finalizing an agreement to do a pilot project for the South Korean government. SpeedNext, a turnkey offering that costs a few hundred dollars per month, allows companies to deliver video programming over the Internet. It has 35 customers, including newspapers such as Istanbul Times.

They're making the most of their time in Chicago. SpeedNext lined up three new customers in the first week, CEO Tarkan Anlar said.

Mr. Gillespie, who is running his own startup, Networking Research Group, out of 1871, says he and his partners hope eventually to start their own venture fund in Turkey. Mr. Cicekoglu, who runs Sente Advisory Services in Turkey, previously worked for the corporate venture arm of chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which invested in InContext.